E-business continues to be a rapidly evolving area of information technology. Typical e-business transactions include the buying and selling of goods over a computer network, such as the Internet. In general, business entities tend to conduct transactions across the Internet with heterogeneous systems, applications, databases, and communication technologies. These Internet type e-business transactions have typically been defined, by person-to-program interactions. For example, such interactions allow individuals to access programs on network browsers. While these networking systems have been revolutionary in many respects, such networking systems nevertheless present several limitations.
In this regard, web services are emerging as tools for use on the Internet for creating next generation distributed data processing systems. Essentially, web services involve business and consumer applications that enable heterogeneous computer systems to communicate seamlessly over a network; especially in a manner whereby cross platform application integration occurs. Such web services typically rely on standard technology, such as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Messages between web service requesters and providers are communicated in an XML format and conducted through with the network-neutral SOAP over an HTTP connection. As a result, web services provide an approach for unifying integration of a wide variety of computers and software that are involved in e-business. Use of this approach facilitates program-to-program interactions without requiring user-to-program interactions and this presents, of course, significant advantages.
In a typical web services business transaction, a service requester application queries a web services registry by specifying functions and seeking a registered provider of such services. The web services providers typically publish (e.g., advertise) the services they are making available with a standard encoding called Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The web services requester retrieves the stored information from the registry, including how to connect to the web services provider. Then once a selection occurs, a requester's application and a provider's application communicate for establishing a business transaction.
However, it is often the case that once a business transaction has been established, i.e. a requester has contracted with a provider for a service that matches the requesters needs, quality of service requirements are often not taken into consideration and the requester is often disappointed with the results. The above mentioned problem is not just limited to web services, in a grid computing environment it often the case that quality of service requirements are often not taken into consideration when processing services etc.
Therefore there is a need within the prior art for the aboveforementioned problems to be alleviated.